The Making of a Personal Style

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Today is my birthday. I'm a Sagittarius. The horoscopes tell me I'm passionate, cynical, optimistic, adventurous and self-reflective. Though when it comes to astrology, I identify most with Jim Morrison who languidly mused on stage, "Sagittarius, the most philosophical of all the signs... but I don't believe in it, I think it's a bunch of bullshit." Guess he was also a cynic.

I do like to indulge in self-reflection, especially on my birthday. There is a question that I am often asked: How do you develop a personal style? I always answer it in a staggeringly generic manner: “Stay true to what you love.” That’s not incorrect, but it's also a cop-out, an inspirational calendar trope. I struggled with developing a personal style for the first five years after picking up the camera, often despairing that I would never find one. During that time, I tried my hand at portraits, landscapes, street photography, self-portraiture, nightlife, black and white, collages, nudes and conceptual. I was good at copying things I'd seen published but the concept of originality seemed a harrowing ideal beyond my abilities. The low-grade anxiety of never actually developing a style was an insidious, ever-present goblin.

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I wish I could say there was a eureka moment that made me finally grasp who I am as a photographer. There wasn't. There was, however, a slow, somewhat liberating (if un-cathartic) realization that my personal style was macramé-d out of the stuff I stole from everyone and everything.

The word “originality” is misleading and unforgiving. It implies that an idea rises out of nowhere, a veritable phoenix out of the ashes — except there aren't even any ashes. As I was searching for this elusive concept, I heard people in the creative fields confess that they don't follow other artists' work in order to not be influenced and stay “original.” Of course, what was really happening is that they ended up unwittingly repeating those that came before without even realizing it. That wasn't originality, that was ignorance. So, I had to look elsewhere.

There is a fundamental difference between “copying” and “stealing” (I’m using these terms cheekily of course). “Copying” is an imitation of a single source. When starting out in any artistic field, it is a great formal (and fun) exercise, a sharpening of the skills. It's a karaoke version of your favorite song, a remake, where the connection between the original source and the facsimile is obvious. “Stealing” — when done right — involves distilling the essence of several sources and combining those disparate elements into something entirely different and uniquely yours — a remix. The more disparate the original sources, the harder it is to pin them down, the more “original,” or maybe a better word would be, personal, the work can become. Kraftwerk, the German Beatles of electronic music, who created what in the 1970s was a completely alien sound seemingly from scratch (and gave birth to pretty much everything we know today as pop music), cite the Beach Boys as one of their main influences. Good luck figuring that one out.

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The first project I've photographed where I was able to combine different elements of things that I loved was Untag This Photo in 2010. It laid the foundation for everything I have done since, jumpstarting what I could finally call my own signature style. I continued developing it with Bachelorette and Fashion Lust. So, for this birthday post, I’ll deconstruct my influences. Or, phrased less pompously, show you who I’ve stolen from all these years.

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Otto Dix and the German Expressionists - I've always admired the almost schizophrenic vibrancy of Otto Dix's society scenes and the blunt representation of the Weimar republic. His nightlife has the desperate gaiety of the end-of the world. It permeates the canvas through saturated colors and frantic compositions. People seem to burst from the canvas feeling constrained by its borders. I photographed in nightclubs imagining I was inside one of Otto Dix's paintings.

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Alex Webb. For quite some time I considered myself a black and white photographer. Then I saw Alex Webb's bleeding, expired Kodachrome colors and was instantly seduced. The main thing I took from him, though, were his intricately layered compositions. All three planes — foreground, middle-ground and background — worked as a single entity, reinforcing one another. His layering is so precise that the images seem staged (they are not). I spent a long time learning how to do that.

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Larry Fink. Besides fancying myself a B/W photographer, I also photographed exclusively using natural light. I thought it somehow more authentic than artificial setups. Then I saw Larry Fink's exquisite (B/W!) nightlife photos immersed in a three-dimensional, off-camera flash. Until then, I didn't even know flash could be manipulated that way, recreating the luminous glow of a Renaissance painting. It also served to direct attention and single out individual stories in a chaotic environment. I got so hooked on flash that it took me about seven years to go back to using natural light in my images.

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Weegee. The infamous photographer is known best for his unflinching, flash-filled portrayal of New York's crime scenes. What I loved the most is the way he focused on the bystanders, anticipating and capturing reactions with a sniper's precision. He was endlessly fascinated with the audience, not the event. I greedily incorporated that bit.

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Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. One of the final scenes of the film shows a group of Italian aristocrats having a wild party during which they descend into drunken, at times cruel, mayhem. The melancholy layers are interspersed with bursts of joyful madness. I can never watch that part without getting emotional. Fellini's ability in turning a seemingly trivial happening into a moment verging on transcendence is the alpha and omega of what I wanted to accomplish in my photography. I am still working on that one.

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A tricky thing about developing a personal style is the danger of getting stuck with it. For a long time, I was the photographer specializing in off-camera flash and publications that hired me expected dramatically lit photos. I realized how locked-in I was when an editor, upon hearing that I didn't plan on using flash to photograph the Amish on vacation in Florida, slightly panicked, and almost took the assignment away from me. I had to change direction.

I like the idea of a style that keeps oscillating, mutating and constantly moving forward. When I was twelve and heavily dabbled in drawing, I wanted to be Picasso. The idea of transforming oneself over and over felt freeing to me. My horoscope does say that Sagittarius' hates being confined to a single route. Maybe Jim Morrison was wrong after all?

Nah.

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Find me on Instagram @dina_litovsky